Pandora's Judgement
by GraveDigger Resurrection
Summary: The sky is a collage of neon lights and skyscrapers, and she can never remember him looking small to her before, but now he does, and it's a thought that frightens her.


**Title: **Pandora's Judgement  
**Rating: **K  
**Genre: **Angst, General  
**Pairing: **B/A  
**Spoilers: **Post-Untethered; everything before that (specifically Endgame) is fair game.  
**A/N: **Not my usual style, so we'll see how this goes. (P.S. Retrograde will be updated this week. Promise.)

* * *

When his mother died, she'd hoped he'd finally start to heal.

But hope is as foolish as it is selfish, and now she finds the grainy pieces of this shattered man sifting through her fingers like so much sand. He is scarred and scattered, but still grasping at the straws scythed down by a reaper he is powerless against inside the burning field of his own broken family. He does not know how to save himself, and so he is left clutching with his father's fingers at the echoes of his mother's heart.

She finds him in Time's Square, but he is still lost. Standing among a million other people with nowhere to go, but he is the only one who has stood still long enough to realize it.

He is unshaven, unkempt, and uncaring except for everything that never cared for him. He is a mess, and so much more beautiful for it that her throat aches and her fingers cramp with the need to hurt him or hit him or hold him so close he will never think about all the people who have let him go before. Instead, she hands him coffee.

"You look cold," She says, and he looks down at the Styrofoam cup wryly, because she is being nice, and he knows it.

The sky is a collage of neon lights and skyscrapers, and she can never remember him looking small to her before, but now he does, and it's a thought that frightens her. And she can see, in the tightness around his eyes, that it scares him too. Because maybe, if he shrinks so small he disappears, nothing will change at all.

"I talked to Frank." And she knows then, as his voice quits, but his lips keep moving, that this is not The Real Bobby, because The Real Bobby never tells her things like this, and never looks like he is praying to a God he doesn't know.

"Mmm," She says, because Bobby likes her silences or he hates them, but the cup is trembling in his hand and she doesn't know what to do.

"He's heard from Donny."

His head tilts, his neck bending like an unhinged door as finally, finally, he meets her eyes with his own dark, tired ones. They are full, for a moment, of hurt, and loneliness, and a family he cannot keep together, and love he has never learned to give. But then they empty, and empty, and _empty_, and there is nothing there at all, and her breath catches behind her teeth because she thinks maybe he has finally given up, and she has no idea what comes next.

What's next is that he takes a sip of the coffee. His nose crinkles in distaste, and he tells her it is the worst thing he has ever had and thanks her for bringing it to him. He pauses, his lips pursing beneath his beard as he stares down at the sidewalk, fidgety even in his stillness. Another 'Thank you' leaves his mouth, soft and awkward, and he catches her gaze with his own shy one, and Alex has never felt too big or too clumsy, but now, standing in the wide open brightness of a New York Night, she does.

"I mean it, Eames." And what he's really saying is '_I love you',_ and maybe '_please don't leave_,' but he would never say that, because everybody always leaves. She hears it just the same.

"You're hungry." It is not a question, because he lies about even the most ridiculous things. She wonders at that-- always has. Wonders when he realized the world would hurt him with his own truths, tearing down at everything inside him and outside him until he was nothing but the things he didn't have. Wonders how young he was when he hid himself behind his fiction and decided never to come out again.

He nods and smiles, and that is shy, too, but not a lie. And his eyes sweep to hers again, and they are still empty, but suddenly she thinks that maybe it is not so much that he is Giving Up, but that he is Letting Go. Because he's smiling, and defeat will never have that grace.

The city breathes into her, and finally, she exhales.

She does not tell him where they are going, but she takes his cold fingers in her own, and leads him out of the city. They will go to her apartment. She will try too cook him dinner, and burn their food, and they will end up eating Poptarts from the cupboard. They will have no wine, but perhaps, just perhaps, she will still kiss him drunkenly, and he will kiss her back, and together they will glue his jagged pieces back in place and heal them both.

One can only hope.


End file.
